Zero-Tolerance Marches On–Especially in New York City

I was moved to write this blog entry after giving a four-hour presentation of my Bullies to Buddies approach to the middle- and high-school staff of a Special Education school that serves New York City–an experience I hope I will never have to repeat.

My basic philosophy, if you are not aware of it, is that the best way to reduce bullying is by teaching students how to handle it on their own rather than playing police officers trying to protect the students from each other and punishing kids for bullying behavior. The latter approach has taken over our country and is being written in stone by State after State passing school anti-bullying laws forbidding any kind of behavior that can upset anyone. Even though researchers repeatedly tell us that zero-tolerance doesn’t work, the zero-tolerance movement continues to grow in strength. Why? It’s because the “experts” themselves don’t know the alternative to zero-tolerance. In an earlier article, I wrote about a lecture in which the highly revered childhood aggression expert James Garbarino informed an audience that zero-tolerance doesn’t work, and then suggested that the solution to bullying was to make it a “human rights issue.” As though violations of human rights are to be tolerated! He simply replaced zero-tolerance with a euphemism for zero-tolerance.

I travel throughout the continental United States giving seminars and trainings, and nowhere, to my great chagrin, is zero-tolerance more evident that in my own hometown of New York City. About a year ago, I was hired by a public school in my own borough of Staten Island to implement my Bullies to Buddies program. In the middle of my standard presentation to students, the principal threw me out! Why? Because in my role-plays with children, I used the words “idiot” and “pee.” When I had a child push me in a role-play to teach kids how to deal with physical aggression, the principal had had more than she could take and ordered me to leave the building! Here I am, hired to teach kids how to deal with aggression, but apparently those who hired me apparently believe that if kids hear words like idiot and pee, and watch me being pushed, the children will be terribly harmed, perhaps even growing up to be psychopathic killers.

Several months ago, I gave my Anger Control Made Easy seminar in Manhattan. To teach how to deal with ethnic insults, I requested a volunteer to come up front and insult me for being a Jew–a demonstration I have done quite often. You should have seen the look of horror on the participants’ faces! They looked at me like I was absolutely insane! You would have thought I was asking them to rape their mothers! Not one person dared to volunteer. Adults—mental health professionals no less—who are supposed to help people learn to deal with the difficulties of life, have been so brainwashed to believing that the most harmful thing in the world is an ethnic insult, cannot fathom making ethnic insults even within the context of a make-believe role-play for training purposes!

My most recent humiliating experience occurred in the New York City special education school I mentioned at the beginning of this article. My role-plays repeatedly demonstrated their effectiveness, yet many of the staff were outraged by the idea that any student should be allowed to “get away” with touching another student, even when there is absolutely no pain involved (and I am not referring to sexual touching, which of course is not acceptable). At one point I could hardly continue with my presentation because of the bombardment of opposition.

To some extent, the staff opposition was due to their difficulty imagining how my techniques would work for classrooms full of behaviorally disturbed students. Certainly it is more difficult to teach such kids to control their impulses than to teach non-impaired students. But imagine the alternative: demanding that kids who have difficulty controlling themselves not touch anyone, and punishing them when they do! How is a school supposed to accomplish this? Any attempt to get such kids to stop touching each other is going to keep the staff busy with endless disciplinary actions, taking away precious academic time in order to deal with nonsense. One teacher, in her revulsion at my approach, invoked Columbine as a justification for zero-tolerance, as though adults punishing kids for the slightest acts of aggression is going to teach them they should not want to shoot up their perceived bullies!

The school staff, of course, never used the distasteful word “punishment” when explaining how they respond to children's acts of aggression, using the more positive-sounding euphemism, “consequences,” that is the vogue in the educational world. It was explained to me that the school does not “punish” kids. They have a three-tier system in which kids are sent to the principal’s office, where they are first warned about their behavior. Each trip to the principal’s office earns a more serious response, culminating in suspension for the third incident.

Don’t school staff realize that sending a child to the principal’s office, even for a reprimand and warning, is punishment? Do they think it is a reward, or even a neutral act? If you and I are kids, and I get you sent to the principal’s office because you bothered me, you will hate me even if you weren’t immediately suspended. And you will hate the principal, too. You will want to get even, so the next incident will have been set in motion. In revenge, you will commit aggression against me again, and again I will get you sent to the principal’s office, till you are expelled from the school that is being paid to provide you with an academic education! Yes, the very act of sending a child to the principal’s office is punishment, causing kids to hate both each other and the school. It is high time the educational establishment stopped fooling itself with euphemisms that help schools deny the fact that they are punishing students.

Schools declare that they are dedicated to teaching tolerance, but zero-tolerance policies promote intolerance. If we want to help our children, we need to teach them how to handle the ordinary and inevitable acts of aggression they encounter. If they don’t learn how to handle aggression in their childhood, we are handicapping them for life. Having been led by their schools to believe they are entitled to a life in which no one abuses them in any way, they are going to be in for a real shock when they get married and have children, and discover what abuse is really like!

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